A Decade of Recognition

As organizers of the Petrona Award for the Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year look forward to handing out their 11th-annual prize in 2024, they revisit the contest’s first 10 recipients, beginning in 2013 with Liza Marklund’s Last Will (Corgi), translated by Neil Smith.

The Petrona Award takes its name from a blog written by Maxine Clarke, a British editor and “champion of Scandinavian crime fiction,” who died in 2012. As press materials have explained, “The Petrona Award is open to crime fiction in translation, either written by a Scandinavian author or set in Scandinavia, and published in the UK in the previous calendar year.”